Publishers

Publisher Support

Google Scholar can boost the worldwide visibility and accessibility of your content. We work with publishers of scholarly information to index peer-reviewed papers, theses, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from all disciplines of research and make them searchable on Google and Google Scholar.

This section provides policy and technical information for scholarly publishers and societies. Detailed technical inclusion guidelines for webmasters can be found here.

Indexing Policies

Multiple versions of a work are grouped to improve its ranking

In many research areas versions of a work may appear as preprints and conference papers before being published as a journal article. These preliminary versions of a work are often cited in addition to the authoritative journal version. The number of citations to a particular work is an important part of determining its rank in the Google Scholar search results. Grouping versions allows us to collect all citations to all versions of a work. In practice, this can significantly improve the position of an article in the search results.

Publisher's full-text, if indexed, is the primary version

When multiple versions of a work are indexed, we select the full and authoritative text from the publisher as the primary version. We can only do this if we are able to successfully identify, crawl and process the full text of the publisher's version.

Publishers have control over access to their articles

We work with publishers to preserve their control over access to their content and only cache articles and papers that don't have access restrictions. Publishers can help us by identifying the regions of their sites that have access restrictions.

Google users must see at least the complete abstract or the first full page

This is a necessary component of our indexing program. For papers with access restrictions, all users clicking on search results must see at least the full author-written abstract or the first full page of the article without requiring to login or click on additional links.

We will respond to complaints regarding copyright infringement

Our policy is to respond to all notices of alleged copyright infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For directions and more information, please click here.

Subscriber Links Policies

Google's use of electronic holdings information

We will use electronic holdings information for generating per article links in our search results to publisher servers. We will not share this information with third parties or use it for marketing purposes.

Electronic holdings usage information

We will not share information with third parties on the usage of your electronic holdings or on aggregate usage based on institutional characteristics or profiles.

Publishers can withdraw electronic holdings information

Publishers can ask us to stop using previously available electronic holdings information either automatically by removing the holdings information, or manually by sending us a request. Once the information is no longer available to us, we will stop using it within 30 days.

General Questions

I'm a publisher of scholarly works and would like to have my content included in Google and Google Scholar?

We would love to work with you. As noted in the policies, an abstract (at least) of each work must be available to non-subscribers who come from Google and Google Scholar. Please configure your website according to our technical inclusion guidelines, and then contact us to consider it for inclusion in Google Scholar.

I publish scholarly textbooks and monographs. Can my content be included in Google Scholar?

Maybe. Google Scholar indexes mostly scholarly articles. For textbooks and monographs, we recommend Google Book Search. Google Scholar automatically includes scholarly works from Google Book Search.

Can I see usage statistics for my content?

Since users click through to your website, your web server logs should have all the usage statistics.

What do I do if I believe you're linking to a webpage that infringes my copyright?

It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For directions and more information, please click here.

Technical Questions

My articles are in PDF format. Can you still index my site?

Yes. We can index PDF articles as long as they're searchable and as long as their size doesn't exceed 5MB. For larger documents and for scanned images that require OCR, we recommend Google Book Search.

How can I tell if a PDF file has searchable text?

Open the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click 'Find' (look for the binocular icon), and confirm that you can search for and find several words on the page.

Some of my articles are split into multiple files, one file per section. Can you work with these?

If we're showing 'Cached' links for your restricted-access content, please email us specific examples of where the links appear. Display of cached links for restricted-access content isn't intentional, but may happen if our methodical crawlers accidentally discover a forgotten alternative interface to your content. You'll need to tell us of all such interfaces, because crawlers can go places where you least expect them. Please email us and we'll look into it.

If you believe another site is infringing your copyright, please see our directions on the DMCA process.

If we're showing unwanted Quick Abstracts for your restricted-access content, please email us specific examples of where the abstracts appear. Display of unwanted Quick Abstracts for restricted-access content isn't intentional, but may happen if our methodical crawlers accidentally discover a forgotten alternative interface to your content. You'll need to tell us of all such interfaces, because crawlers can go places where you least expect them. Please email us and we'll look into it.

If you believe another site is infringing your copyright, please see our directions on the DMCA process.

Is there anything I can do to help rank my articles better?

Indeed you can. Our indexing algorithms automatically extract bibliographic data, citations and other information from articles and use it for ranking purposes. Providing authoritative metadata about your articles can help facilitate this and can increase the likelihood of identifying all the citations to your articles. We strongly recommend this approach. Please refer to the following technical inclusion guidelines for the details of how to implement it.

All my articles are available to your crawlers, but not all of them seem to show up in Google Scholar. Can I do something to help improve coverage?

Yes. Gaps in coverage are certainly not intentional; but they could be caused by a number of different technical issues in the automatic processing of your website by our search robots. The troubleshooting section in our technical inclusion guidelines describes ways to identify and fix common coverage issues. We encourage you to take a look.